Much of this resource was reviewed and updated in spring 2023. Significant changes to Selenium (v.4) and the Flask extension Bootstrap-Flask necessitated code revisions as well as document rewrites.
Read the documention: Python Beginners
This repo was first built in spring 2020. It's based on an earlier repo that is no longer updated.
In this new repo I used Sphinx and Read the Docs for the first time (so that was a journey in itself) to build a text for journalism students learning Python.
We are using Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (second edition) as our textbook and main resource for learning Python from zero. Therefore, this repo does not attempt to teach Python basics — although it does include some basic scripts.
Code for the course is all in the /python_code_examples folder.
The main reason for the docs is that the course covers:
- Introduction to Python
- Web scraping with Beautiful Soup and some Selenium
- Flask for building data-driven web apps
I've used books in the past for teaching parts 2 and 3 (notably Web Scraping with Python and Flask Web Development), but this year I've cut back to just the one book.
Rather than try to reconfigure the previous repo, I started from scratch here and built the new repo with an emphasis on the docs.
For the scraping and Flask segments of the course, the docs will be the primary instructional resource.
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